Got my hands on a copy of the New Yorker style guide, a top secret document whose arcane mysteries have baffled all but a very select few. The New Yorker has the greatest copyediting (subediting) department in the known universe. These are their sacred texts. Be careful reading, there's no guarantee you won't end up like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
General notes
In general, for style, grammar and spelling guidance, imagine it's 1823.
coöperate
Write coöperate with a diaeresis over the 2nd o. This shows there's a hyphen missing. No, I don't know why we don't just have a hyphen. If we didn't have the dots, people might think we didn't know how to spell cuperate.
cuperate There's no such word as cuperate.
diaeresis
Turns out the diaeresis in coöperate comes from Afrikaans. And New York used to be called New Amsterdam, OK?
Dutch
I was talking about the Dutch. Keep up. And it's not from Afrikaans, it's a pronunciation guide mark.
élite
With pronunciation guide mark. It's easy to spot the élite, as they are the type of person who write it like that.
hyperbole No pronunciation guide marks.
Internet Cap up. Because someone's got to. Also, just because we have given up and admitted the web exists, doesn't mean we won't stick a banner on the site that obscures four lines of text.
numbers
Write out all numbers in full. And then add some more letters. Yes, even dates. OK, not dates, but THAT'S IT FOR SLACKING. However, whenever you write a year in figures, add a couple of commas. As a sort of consolation.
pronunciation
Have you ever noticed that pronunciation isn't pronunciated the way it's written?
punctuation
All punctuation goes inside quote marks, even if it's from a different sentence.
teen-age
We must never, ever forget that these are two separate words
traveller
Words such as traveller and focussed have double consonants. Sometimes this is because that's how they are spelled.
writing to length If an article is going fine, and saying everything it needs to say and looks great, add 10,000 words to it.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Thursday, November 07, 2013
this sucks
I've often wondered if there's special training for women when their child has a baby, whether someone takes them aside in the hospital and says "psst, here are you'll need to know this" & then explains the mysteries of egg sucking ... or is it just something that happens naturally when the grandchild is born, a sort of evolutionary response that conveys the secret
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
and the world remained silent
Wednesday's Times has an Olympic-related guide to the Most Arseachingly Pretentious Businesses in East London. As you might imagine, it’s a wide field. Contestants (with quotes from their websites or The Times) include
The Boundary Rooftop Restaurant
The Loft Project
Loafing
Crate Brewery & Pizzeria
Ruby’s Basement Bar
The Boundary Rooftop Restaurant
The space is replete with a large sail-like canopy, heating, festoon lighting and Welsh blankets
The Loft Project
The Loft Project is an experiment in food and people, set within an intimate and beautifully considered environment in East London
Loafing
We pride ourselves on our unique range of bespoke locally-sourced cakes
Crate Brewery & Pizzeria
Pizzas are to die for. Favourites include the sweet Middle Eastern Lamp with pinenuts and apricot or the sweet potato with Gorgonzola and walnuts
Ruby’s Basement Bar
Blackberry mojitos are served in original 1940s milk bottles
Twenty years on from being scared to walk down Kingsland High Road at night, I am now scared to walk down Kingsland High Road at any time.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Waiting For Arsene
Estragon: And if he buys?
Vladimir: We'll be saved.
Estragon: We might try him with other names.
Vladimir: I'm afraid he's dying.
Estragon: It'd be amusing.
Vladimir: What'd be amusing?
Estragon: To try him with other names, one after the other. It'd pass the time. And we'd be bound to hit on the right one sooner or later.
Vladimir: Don't go yet.
Samir: I'm going.
Vladimir: What do you do when you fall far from help?
Samir: We wait till we can get up. Then we go on. On!
Vladimir: Before you go tell them to sing.
Samir: Who?
Vladimir: The fans.
Samir: To sing?
Vladimir: Yes. Or to think.
Vladimir: Let's wait and see what he says.
Estragon: Who?
Vladimir: Arsene.
Estragon: Good idea.
Vladimir: Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand.
Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?
Vladimir: Oh ... Nothing very definite.
Estragon: A kind of player.
Vladimir: Precisely
Estragon: And what did he reply?
Vladimir: That he'd see.
Estragon: That he couldn't promise anything.
Vladimir: That he'd have to think it over.
Estragon: Nothing happens, nobody comes, everybody goes, it's awful!
Estragon: Good idea.
Vladimir: Let's wait till we know exactly how we stand.
Estragon: What exactly did we ask him for?
Vladimir: Oh ... Nothing very definite.
Estragon: A kind of player.
Vladimir: Precisely
Estragon: And what did he reply?
Vladimir: That he'd see.
Estragon: That he couldn't promise anything.
Vladimir: That he'd have to think it over.
Estragon: Nothing happens, nobody comes, everybody goes, it's awful!
Vladimir: Well? Shall we buy?
Estragon: Yes, let's buy.
They do not move
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Writer's schlock
Writing is a hard slog. I might write I don't know 14 words at a time before I need to get up, make a cup of tea, check the internet is still there, scratch my balls, maybe write five or six more words, check the internet is still still there, go and look at myself in the bathroom for a while, get a glass of water and a sandwich, then read the 20 words I've written for a bit and then go out, after checking that the internet is still there. It's a slog, certainly, roughly equivalent to dragging a pool of honey across Arizona. It's as easy and forthcoming as stapling your fingers to the table, or trying to peel paint off the wall. When I do write it's normally fine, the words come out fairly easily and that, but it's just that I don't actually write very much, and it's punctuated with constant stoppages of practically no value, a consequence of my having the discipline of a very tired elastic band.
I have probably had no discipline for writing since I left school or thereabouts, and became obsessed with the idea that life should be about enjoyment and not forcing yourself to do things, that thou should do what thou wilt and all that, even if doing what thou wilt amounts to watching the telly for sixteen hours a day or, more likely nowadays, trawling the far reaches of the internet like an astronomer looking for signs of intelligent life. In a novel by Aleister Crowley, where apparently the do what thou wilt thing comes from, a rich heroin addict discovers that his calling is to be an engineer, but he only discovers that after doing what thou wilt a lot has enabled him to forget what he thinks he is supposed to do and find what it is that he is truly called to do. Which is fine and all, but I found what I am truly called to do fucking years ago, and it's not going to pay the bills. Also, most of us have probably had the experience of being totally immersed in something we really love doing, but yet soon find that the reality of trying to get do that thing in the real world, for a living, has little to do with what we like about it, and more to do with how we can best position ourselves in the marketplace to take advantage of prevailing conditions, and all that jazz. So I'm not so keen on do what thou wilt any more, although it has given me some magnificent afternoons watching Jerry Springer in the pub in years gone by.
The upshot of this is that I'm trying to write a book, because that is my attempt to turn something I wilt, ie writing, or at least being a writer, if not actually physically writing stuff, into something else I wilt, which is having some money at some point in the next 40 years. (Yes I know that this is unlikely, even if I produce an opus, but bear with me.) So this book, it's very short, and not particularly long, there aren't many words and it doesn't make any sense, but it's a cracking read probably, and brilliant and I think you should buy it now, in advance of publication, to guarantee you a copy before the rush gets going, obviously if I wasn't to actually produce it I would probably have to say something about a refund but that's cool, my guess is that you are the sort of gracious person who doesn't feel the need to demand refunds for undelivered produce, or maybe think that asking for money is undignified, or are just happy it has gone to a good home. I realise that I have now descended into writing begging letters on my own blog, which can't be a good sign, but anything to keep from knuckling down and writing my book.
I have probably had no discipline for writing since I left school or thereabouts, and became obsessed with the idea that life should be about enjoyment and not forcing yourself to do things, that thou should do what thou wilt and all that, even if doing what thou wilt amounts to watching the telly for sixteen hours a day or, more likely nowadays, trawling the far reaches of the internet like an astronomer looking for signs of intelligent life. In a novel by Aleister Crowley, where apparently the do what thou wilt thing comes from, a rich heroin addict discovers that his calling is to be an engineer, but he only discovers that after doing what thou wilt a lot has enabled him to forget what he thinks he is supposed to do and find what it is that he is truly called to do. Which is fine and all, but I found what I am truly called to do fucking years ago, and it's not going to pay the bills. Also, most of us have probably had the experience of being totally immersed in something we really love doing, but yet soon find that the reality of trying to get do that thing in the real world, for a living, has little to do with what we like about it, and more to do with how we can best position ourselves in the marketplace to take advantage of prevailing conditions, and all that jazz. So I'm not so keen on do what thou wilt any more, although it has given me some magnificent afternoons watching Jerry Springer in the pub in years gone by.
The upshot of this is that I'm trying to write a book, because that is my attempt to turn something I wilt, ie writing, or at least being a writer, if not actually physically writing stuff, into something else I wilt, which is having some money at some point in the next 40 years. (Yes I know that this is unlikely, even if I produce an opus, but bear with me.) So this book, it's very short, and not particularly long, there aren't many words and it doesn't make any sense, but it's a cracking read probably, and brilliant and I think you should buy it now, in advance of publication, to guarantee you a copy before the rush gets going, obviously if I wasn't to actually produce it I would probably have to say something about a refund but that's cool, my guess is that you are the sort of gracious person who doesn't feel the need to demand refunds for undelivered produce, or maybe think that asking for money is undignified, or are just happy it has gone to a good home. I realise that I have now descended into writing begging letters on my own blog, which can't be a good sign, but anything to keep from knuckling down and writing my book.
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Commentator commentry
When I was a kid I quite fancied being a football commentator. Like most idle fantasies of my childhood, I have no idea what the hell I was thinking, but my guess is that it was a way of being involved in the game long after it had become obvious I was never going to play the game. A those who can, do, those who can't, commentate, sort of thing. I at least never wanted to be a referee, which would be inexcusable, like wanting to be a policeman, a role for emotionally undernourished types. Having said that I once acted as the ref in a primary school game between my year and the year below and had a great time disallowing their goals for no legitimate reason whatsoever. Which, such was our collectively shaky understanding of the actual rules, they accepted without much fuss, .
At age about 9 my class made a book with all the rules of football in it. The offside rule was written up as "You are offside when you are in the other team's half", which even at that age most of us could see wasn't the whole picture. So it's not that boys are genetically programmed to understand the offside rule, it's just that we've generally been trying to get our heads around it for longer than girls, who in those days and at that age seemed to spend their whole time arranging coloured pens. Richard Keys and Andy Gray should probably remember that there was a time they didn't fully understand the rules of football - like for instance the rule about not chatting shit into an open mic - although alas they seem for the moment to have kept their places as the two smuggest men on the box.
Some people have been suggesting that as Ron Atkinson was sacked for being racist off-air, so these two leprechauns-of-culture should also take a long walk off a short plank. But Ron used the word 'nigger' and he's not a rapper, so he had to go. What will happen to Gray or Keys when they have to work with a female commentator? I'm hoping for spontaneous combustion.
How do you become a football commentator? Do you just become a commentator and then move up the ranks to football? Or do you somehow get into football and shuffle along the aisle until you get to commentating? Where are the jobs advertised? It's not as if you can study it at Loughborough. Where do they get new commentators from? Perhaps when you get dropped calls, or missed calls from strange numbers, it's the BBC, phoning round listening to people's answerphone messages and "hellos" in search of the perfect commentating voice.
Not that commentating is all it's cracked up to be. Can you really make a living as a commentator when there's not that many matches on anyway? Can a second tier commentator make enough money out of being on five minutes of MOTD highlights to be able to get by the rest of the week? What do they do the rest of the time? Bone up on football encyclopedias? Practice pronunciation skills and comment sprinting? And it must be quite tiring, the concentration of having to commentate, to be able to tell which player the ball's gone to in a blink of an eye, and with Colemanballs always on your shoulder. Myself, I think I'd prefer the commentator's mate's job, where you don't have to do much of the grunt work and only have to step in with football knowledge occasionally, most of which you can probably just make up.
Obviously recruitment is slow in the commentating business, what with there being not much staff turnover. Once you're in the commentary chair, you're set, it's the world's last ever job for life. But down the pecking order, you need to start thinking seriously about wacking some of your senior colleagues if you ever want to get the big games. Perhaps that's what the Graykeysgate leaker was thinking. Or, and this is my guess, they've both made such cunts of themselves over the years that everyone who works with them is gasping at the chance to turn them in.
At age about 9 my class made a book with all the rules of football in it. The offside rule was written up as "You are offside when you are in the other team's half", which even at that age most of us could see wasn't the whole picture. So it's not that boys are genetically programmed to understand the offside rule, it's just that we've generally been trying to get our heads around it for longer than girls, who in those days and at that age seemed to spend their whole time arranging coloured pens. Richard Keys and Andy Gray should probably remember that there was a time they didn't fully understand the rules of football - like for instance the rule about not chatting shit into an open mic - although alas they seem for the moment to have kept their places as the two smuggest men on the box.
Some people have been suggesting that as Ron Atkinson was sacked for being racist off-air, so these two leprechauns-of-culture should also take a long walk off a short plank. But Ron used the word 'nigger' and he's not a rapper, so he had to go. What will happen to Gray or Keys when they have to work with a female commentator? I'm hoping for spontaneous combustion.
How do you become a football commentator? Do you just become a commentator and then move up the ranks to football? Or do you somehow get into football and shuffle along the aisle until you get to commentating? Where are the jobs advertised? It's not as if you can study it at Loughborough. Where do they get new commentators from? Perhaps when you get dropped calls, or missed calls from strange numbers, it's the BBC, phoning round listening to people's answerphone messages and "hellos" in search of the perfect commentating voice.
Not that commentating is all it's cracked up to be. Can you really make a living as a commentator when there's not that many matches on anyway? Can a second tier commentator make enough money out of being on five minutes of MOTD highlights to be able to get by the rest of the week? What do they do the rest of the time? Bone up on football encyclopedias? Practice pronunciation skills and comment sprinting? And it must be quite tiring, the concentration of having to commentate, to be able to tell which player the ball's gone to in a blink of an eye, and with Colemanballs always on your shoulder. Myself, I think I'd prefer the commentator's mate's job, where you don't have to do much of the grunt work and only have to step in with football knowledge occasionally, most of which you can probably just make up.
Obviously recruitment is slow in the commentating business, what with there being not much staff turnover. Once you're in the commentary chair, you're set, it's the world's last ever job for life. But down the pecking order, you need to start thinking seriously about wacking some of your senior colleagues if you ever want to get the big games. Perhaps that's what the Graykeysgate leaker was thinking. Or, and this is my guess, they've both made such cunts of themselves over the years that everyone who works with them is gasping at the chance to turn them in.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
quid hoc sis vult?
I've got a dictionary of foreign terms sitting in my toilet. It's a book with a list list of foreign terms which we (actually a very small subset of we, but never mind) use in English. Phrases like Dieu et mon Droit, which sometimes appears on the side of £1 coins; or quid pro quo, which doesn't and maybe should, but is Latin for something in return - by which I mean "something in return" not "[something] in return", nor even retsomethingurn (or gnihtemos), if you want to get cruciverbalist about it. I chose those examples because I had actually heard of them previous to owning this book, but it's full of phrases I haven't heard of and my plan was that subtly precipitating them mid-colloquy would make me look a great deal better educated than I am. And who doesn't want to look better than they are?
Of course just reading the entries was no good, because one Latin phrase looks much like another after a minute or two, and my memory is so shot it could practically be used to cull pheasants. So I found myself wishing for an index where I could go with an english word or phrase of my own imaginings and have it transformed into a highly rarefied bon mot, ready for insertion into my blogpost. In italics, of course, which is basically just a way of saying ooh look how clever I am, I used such a weird word it has to go on a slant. Or possibly it's just a way of telling your reader it's ok you don't have to understand that word, you're allowed to look it up. Anyway I found myself wishing for such an index and I turned to the back and à merveille! there was such an index. Well, of course fortuna favit fortibus and all that, so I wasn't entirely surprised, and a die my writing has a poco a poco become festooned with exotic phrases, like a prize cow shrouded in rosettes.
The downsides of this policy are, das ist Pech! a) it's an irritatingly unhelpful index and rarely supplies anything like the phrase you need; b) it's amazing how quickly you can slip into sounding like Boris Johnson; and c) surely the very definition of pretentious must be trawling the index of a book of foreign phrases trying to find something to make you sound classically educated. I mean Davus sum, non Oedipus, obviously, but I know that honor habet onus, so I felt obliged to write about it - to put my cards on the table, so to speak - so that we all understood each other.
Of course just reading the entries was no good, because one Latin phrase looks much like another after a minute or two, and my memory is so shot it could practically be used to cull pheasants. So I found myself wishing for an index where I could go with an english word or phrase of my own imaginings and have it transformed into a highly rarefied bon mot, ready for insertion into my blogpost. In italics, of course, which is basically just a way of saying ooh look how clever I am, I used such a weird word it has to go on a slant. Or possibly it's just a way of telling your reader it's ok you don't have to understand that word, you're allowed to look it up. Anyway I found myself wishing for such an index and I turned to the back and à merveille! there was such an index. Well, of course fortuna favit fortibus and all that, so I wasn't entirely surprised, and a die my writing has a poco a poco become festooned with exotic phrases, like a prize cow shrouded in rosettes.
The downsides of this policy are, das ist Pech! a) it's an irritatingly unhelpful index and rarely supplies anything like the phrase you need; b) it's amazing how quickly you can slip into sounding like Boris Johnson; and c) surely the very definition of pretentious must be trawling the index of a book of foreign phrases trying to find something to make you sound classically educated. I mean Davus sum, non Oedipus, obviously, but I know that honor habet onus, so I felt obliged to write about it - to put my cards on the table, so to speak - so that we all understood each other.
Thursday, July 15, 2010
I write like
Put a portion of your writing into this writing analyser and it'll tell you which famous writer you write like.
Me? Based on the last few blog posts: Stephen King, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Conan Doyle (really?), Dan Brown.
I think I'll stop there. It was going so well.
Via (obv), where they deconstruct it until it begs for mercy.
PS. I put my most favourite recent blog post in and got James Joyce. Yeah, the famous comic writer. So maybe this semantic statistical analystical tool don't work as well as I'd hoped, or maybe I should start writing Homer in Holloway.
Me? Based on the last few blog posts: Stephen King, Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur Conan Doyle (really?), Dan Brown.
I think I'll stop there. It was going so well.
Via (obv), where they deconstruct it until it begs for mercy.
PS. I put my most favourite recent blog post in and got James Joyce. Yeah, the famous comic writer. So maybe this semantic statistical analystical tool don't work as well as I'd hoped, or maybe I should start writing Homer in Holloway.
Sunday, June 06, 2010
A novel excuse
The Telegraph has an amusing story about the novelist E.M Forester, which says that he gave up writing novels after his first homosexual experience, at the age of 38.
He only started at 38, so there's hope for me then. But I knew there was a good reason to keep away from the prowling gayers - too much cock saps your creative juices. Basically they're saying that E.M stopped plugging away at his novels, cos he was too busy just plugging away. It gives the homophobes a new angle: it's for your own good, we don't want you to dry up and stop being creative! Now for the first time they can say: Don't be gay, you want to be an artist, darling! So E.M wrote some classic novels, but once he discovered buggery he stopped writing, making it one of those few times that the sword is mightier than the pen. I can just imagine his Victorian father saying to him: "Now E.M, I don't think a novelist is a suitable career for you, I think you should go into banking with Ronald." And then at 38 E.M comes home and says: "Dad, I've got some good news, and some bad news." It is true to say that a lot of creativity comes out of pain, and maybe E.M was just having such a whale of a time, so to speak, that he couldn't keep churning out the middle-class rom coms, which makes you think that perhaps it's time Richard Curtis got himself down Old Compton Street.
Of course the story is probably not true, being in the Torygraph. Their website is actually quite good, if you swerve around the comment pages, ignore the gratuitious slant on the politics stories, and take a hefty pinch of salt with the Obama-is-doomed stuff, but apart from that, it is a busy site with lots of news that doesn't appear on the Guardian or Times sites. But still a story that says gaying ended famous novelist's career does seem a bit too much like moral wishful thinking on their part. And of course it doesn't occur to them that perhaps he felt that he couldn't write about the true romance of his later years because it was illegal, and that blocked his creativity much more than a bit of rough trade round the back of the Vauxhall Tavern. Or maybe he just got to 40 and got rubbish, like the aforementioned Richard Curtis. Which is a depressing thought, but marginally less depressing than the thought that sexual fulfilment will ruin your creativity.
I love the details: he lost his virginity to a wounded soldier, while working for the Red Cross? Was the soldier was just lying on the battlefield with shrapnel wounds all over him and, well, one thing led to another? Or maybe the soldier been hit by a mortar bomb, and was just blown to buggery? And then after that 'Morgan' moved on to tram conductors and (two! at the same time?) policemen. And I love the euphemism of the "energy of his early years was drained by physical fulfilment". You bet it was.After suppressing his sexuality as a young man, Forster, who was known to his friends as Morgan, lost his virginity to a wounded soldier in 1917 while working for the Red Cross in Egypt.
That sexual awakening in his late 30s led to a series of romances with working class men including a tram conductor and two policemen.
After publishing A Passage to India, arguably his greatest work, in 1924, Forster spurned the novel and most creative endeavours for the rest of his life, publishing only occasional short stories, essays and plays.
Wendy Moffat, associate professor of English at Dickinson College, Pennsylvania, who uncovered Forster's secret "sex diary" while researching a new biography of the novelist, said that the energy of his early years was drained by physical fulfilment.
He only started at 38, so there's hope for me then. But I knew there was a good reason to keep away from the prowling gayers - too much cock saps your creative juices. Basically they're saying that E.M stopped plugging away at his novels, cos he was too busy just plugging away. It gives the homophobes a new angle: it's for your own good, we don't want you to dry up and stop being creative! Now for the first time they can say: Don't be gay, you want to be an artist, darling! So E.M wrote some classic novels, but once he discovered buggery he stopped writing, making it one of those few times that the sword is mightier than the pen. I can just imagine his Victorian father saying to him: "Now E.M, I don't think a novelist is a suitable career for you, I think you should go into banking with Ronald." And then at 38 E.M comes home and says: "Dad, I've got some good news, and some bad news." It is true to say that a lot of creativity comes out of pain, and maybe E.M was just having such a whale of a time, so to speak, that he couldn't keep churning out the middle-class rom coms, which makes you think that perhaps it's time Richard Curtis got himself down Old Compton Street.
Of course the story is probably not true, being in the Torygraph. Their website is actually quite good, if you swerve around the comment pages, ignore the gratuitious slant on the politics stories, and take a hefty pinch of salt with the Obama-is-doomed stuff, but apart from that, it is a busy site with lots of news that doesn't appear on the Guardian or Times sites. But still a story that says gaying ended famous novelist's career does seem a bit too much like moral wishful thinking on their part. And of course it doesn't occur to them that perhaps he felt that he couldn't write about the true romance of his later years because it was illegal, and that blocked his creativity much more than a bit of rough trade round the back of the Vauxhall Tavern. Or maybe he just got to 40 and got rubbish, like the aforementioned Richard Curtis. Which is a depressing thought, but marginally less depressing than the thought that sexual fulfilment will ruin your creativity.
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Daily Mail journalist in self-hate shocker!!!!
LIZ JONES: Now I know why I hate myself
Skipping over the obvious - because you write for the Daily Mail, dear - some choice quotes which explain maybe why she writes for the Daily Mail.
Everything I do is tinged with fear. As a child, my over-protective mum was terrified I would be run over ... I always assumed I was in imminent danger of being murdered. I developed a habit of conjuring images of disaster in my head.
So, what precipitated the current crisis? It was a culmination of things. It would be easy to say I became depressed because I got divorced, or my new neighbours in Somerset took a dislike to me. But that's not it. I'm used to not being liked.
I don't think: 'Ooh, I'm a good writer, I'm successful.' I think, hundreds of times a day: 'I'm rubbish, I'm going to be fired.'
Basically, I hate myself.
Well now that a course of intensive psychoanalysis has uncovered a traumatic episode in Ms Jones's childhood (surprisingly enough not inflicted on her by illegal immigrants, or drug-addled teenagers), do we believe that perhaps she'll stop churning out hate-filled, fear-filled copy for the Daily Heil?
We can hope so, although then of course she probably really would get fired.
Skipping over the obvious - because you write for the Daily Mail, dear - some choice quotes which explain maybe why she writes for the Daily Mail.
Everything I do is tinged with fear. As a child, my over-protective mum was terrified I would be run over ... I always assumed I was in imminent danger of being murdered. I developed a habit of conjuring images of disaster in my head.
So, what precipitated the current crisis? It was a culmination of things. It would be easy to say I became depressed because I got divorced, or my new neighbours in Somerset took a dislike to me. But that's not it. I'm used to not being liked.
I don't think: 'Ooh, I'm a good writer, I'm successful.' I think, hundreds of times a day: 'I'm rubbish, I'm going to be fired.'
Basically, I hate myself.
Well now that a course of intensive psychoanalysis has uncovered a traumatic episode in Ms Jones's childhood (surprisingly enough not inflicted on her by illegal immigrants, or drug-addled teenagers), do we believe that perhaps she'll stop churning out hate-filled, fear-filled copy for the Daily Heil?
We can hope so, although then of course she probably really would get fired.
I got 750 words but a bitch ain't one
Writers are often told, along with many other globules of advice - like, get a proper job you jackass - to start the morning by writing a few pages of whatever the hell comes into their head. Recently these appear to have been named 'morning pages', but the idea is well established, that a morning bathing in the stream of your consciousness allows you to unclog your writing brain and tone it up a bit. It's quite relaxing as well, feeling as if you are achieving something without too much effort. Sometimes it can help you think about what you want to write, sometimes it serves as a vent for your anger at the way the world is such a pile of shitcuntfuck, other times it merely gives you an opportunity to fail to string coherent sentences together, but it doesn't matter what you write, good, bad, beautiful or nonsense, and that's the point.
750 words is a run by a nice man in Seattle and its sole purpose is to help you write your morning pages. It counts and saves your output as you write and gives you a notice when you've hit your 750, which it estimates to be three pages worth. It has nice little icons to show you when you've written for a few days on the trot, for the primary school pupil in all of us, and it tells you how quickly you wrote what you wrote. It gives you an amusingly inaccurate 'analysis' of what you've written, comparing mindset, time orientation, primary sense and so on, so you can get an idea of your writing patterns. In time-honoured internet fashion, you can compete against complete strangers to see who can write every day, although nobody can read what you've written. You can search through your old morning pages as you wish, and that's about it. Privacy seems to be as secure as you're going to get, ie yeah he could just sell everything you write but probably he won't. Of course you could just do it yourself on Word or even - god forbid - paper but it's marginally more involving this way. Anyway, I recommend it.
Lifehacker post
Metafilter thread
750 words is a run by a nice man in Seattle and its sole purpose is to help you write your morning pages. It counts and saves your output as you write and gives you a notice when you've hit your 750, which it estimates to be three pages worth. It has nice little icons to show you when you've written for a few days on the trot, for the primary school pupil in all of us, and it tells you how quickly you wrote what you wrote. It gives you an amusingly inaccurate 'analysis' of what you've written, comparing mindset, time orientation, primary sense and so on, so you can get an idea of your writing patterns. In time-honoured internet fashion, you can compete against complete strangers to see who can write every day, although nobody can read what you've written. You can search through your old morning pages as you wish, and that's about it. Privacy seems to be as secure as you're going to get, ie yeah he could just sell everything you write but probably he won't. Of course you could just do it yourself on Word or even - god forbid - paper but it's marginally more involving this way. Anyway, I recommend it.
Lifehacker post
Metafilter thread
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
